I’m now on my third book, but that’s not to say work has finished on the second, ‘Keeper of the Secrets’. Granted, the writing has finished, but the hard work of finding an agent or publisher has just begun. And when I say it’s hard, it is. Very.
Which leaves me with a choice. Carry on looking for representation, or go down the self-publishing route. More and more writers are doing this. But it still leaves a problem: OK, a self published book is out there on Amazon, or whichever platform is chosen, but it falls increasingly to authors to do all the marketing, or pay experts to help them. Buyers still have to be identified and targeted, and awareness raised. The book still has to sell, and the writer still has to create a following and establish that elusive ‘brand.’
In short, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Self-publishing may have changed the author landscape by doing away with the need for an agent or publisher. But a book still has to be good, very good, if it is to sell well, and it still has to be marketed.
The working title of my new book by the way is ‘The Rise and Rise of Tommy Head', and it marks a complete change of direction for me. It's not a psychodrama. It's a comic satire, and I'm having the time of my life with it.
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